Hey all, welcome back to the Real Life Pharmacology podcast. I'm your host, pharmacist, Eric Christensen.

Thank you so much for listening today. Go check out Real Life Pharmacology.com. Get your free PDF on the top 200 drugs.

It's a great little study guide refresher. I pull out some of the most important clinical pearls that you're actually going to see in practice

and loop them in with the drug there.

And I also have obviously seen a lot of pharmacology exams and that type of thing.

And so I pulled out a lot of things that are often tested in exams throughout your career as well when it comes to pharmacology.

So it's a 31-page PDF, absolutely free to you, study, easy to study from, easy to read.

Go get that at real-life pharmacology.com.

All right, let's get into the drug of the day today, and that is Clarithromycin.

The brand name of this medication is biaxin.

Now, it is a macrolide antibiotic.

So similar in class to azithromycin, erythromycin.

And as you maybe know, if you've been out in practice a little bit or have seen some

medications prescribed, it isn't used terribly often.

And there's a couple of reasons for that.

One is that it is twice daily dosing, particularly with the immediate release formulation.

And the other big thing, which I'll cover at the end extensively, is drug interaction.

So those are the two major reasons, in my opinion, why you just don't see this medication used terribly often, but there are a few

select situations where you might see it. All right. So mechanistically, let's cover that. This drug

binds the 50s ribosomal subunit. And ultimately what that does, being an antimicrobial or antibacterial agent,

is that messes up or interferes with bacterial protein synthesis. And by doing that, obviously,

you stop growth and replication of the bacteria and help treat and manage infections, and that's what this medication is used for.

...